Mourning Bucky After His Death In 1945

Mourning Bucky After His Death in 1945

(Inspired by^ this channel is wonderful, their ambiences always get my head in the right place for writing: beware, angst)

You got the news late, when the Commandos came back from the mission...and there was one missing. They didn't need to say a thing - the gap in their ranks, and the look on Steve's face, said it all.

Being a nurse, you couldn't stop to feel the pain or even really process it. But once the rush ended, and you stepped into the quiet street, everything fell on you at once. Tears poured, and your heart felt like it could burst. Bucky usually picked you up when your breaks came. His absence hit you like a truck.

Instead, you walked along the street in a thin army uniform and shivered all the way. A bitter wind blew through Brooklyn this time of year, but the cold you felt had little to do with the weather.

Somehow, your feet brought you to the old docks where Bucky worked through the summers. That was years ago, now, and seemed like a different life. You couldn't help but smile, recalling the laughter and choice language that used to fill the air.

Once, when you began to realise the full extent of your feelings, you came to the docks and watched him for the whole day. Instead of hiding away how you felt, you relished in it.

Sixteen was a hell of an age to fall in love, especially in the thirties. But reciprocated love...it blossomed and bloomed so beautifully. With Steve, your brother, you and Bucky built a life together.

It was always Steve who talked about their future...without him. The sickly boy never expected to live past thirty, and, despite how painful the idea was, neither did they.

Never in a million years did you imagine Bucky going first.

You couldn't hold it anymore. The sobs ripped out, and you sank to the ground by the water. One hand tightly clasped the other, a cold, glinting ring pressing into your skin. A promise, a commitment...now nothing but a memory. The life you talked about, planned so dreamily, even in the face of the war, gone. Destroyed in an instant.

Deep hatred and a desire for vengance reared its head in you. Bucky always said you and Steve were too alike. But the decision already cemented itself in your mind.

When Steve crashed the Valkyrie, no one was left behind. Two days before, you had vanished on a mission in Switzerland - presumed dead. He had nothing, not even Peggy, really, to keep him on Earth.

Little did he know, that the two sweethearts had been reunited. And Hydra would make good use of them both.

thoughts on the Pevensies returning home

Peter Pevensie was a strange boy. His mind is too old for his body, too quick, too sharp for a boy. He walks with a presence expected of a king or a royal, with blue eyes that darken like storms. He holds anger and a distance seen in veterans, his hand moving to his hip for a scabbard that isn't there - knuckles white. He moves like a warless soldier, an unexplained limp throwing his balance. He writes in an intricate scrawl unseen before the war, his letters curving in a foreign way untaught in his education. Peter returned a stranger from the war, silent, removed, an island onto himself with a burden too heavy for a child to bear.

Only in the aftermath of a fight do his eyes shine; nose burst, blood dripping, smudged across his cheek, knuckles bruised, and hands shaking; he's alive. He rises from the floor, knighted, his eyes searching for his sisters in the crowd. His brother doesn't leave his side. They move as one, the Pevensies, in a way their peers can't comprehend as they watch all four fall naturally in line.

But Peter is quiet, studious, and knowledgeable, seen only by his teachers as they read pages and pages of analytical political study and wonderful fictional tales. "The Pevensie boy will go far," they say, not knowing he already has.

His mother doesn't recognize him after the war. She watches distrustfully from a corner. She sobs at night, listening to her son's screams, knowing nothing she can do will ease their pain. Helen ran on the first night, throwing Peter's door open to find her children by his bedside - her eldest thrashing uncontrollably off the mattress with a sheen of sweat across his skin. Susan sings a mellow tune in a language Helen doesn't know, a hymn, that brings Peter back to them. He looks to Edmund for something and finds comfort in his eyes, a shared knowing. Her sons, who couldn't agree on the simplest of discussions, fall in line. But Peter sleeps with a knife under his cushion. She found out the hard way, reaching for him during one of his nightmares only to find herself pinned against the wall - a wild look in Peter's eye before he staggered back and dropped the knife.

Edmund throws himself into books, taking Lucy with him. They sit for hours in the library in harmony, not saying a word. His balance is thrown too, his mind searching for a limp that he doesn't have, missing the weight of his scabbard at his side. He joins the fencing club and takes Peter with him. They fence like no one else; without a worthy adversary, the boys take to each other with a wildness in their grins and a skillset unforeseen in beginner fencers. Their rapiers are an exertion of their bodies, as natural as shaking hands, and for the briefest time, they seem at peace. He shrinks away from the snow when it comes, thrust into the darkest places of his mind, unwilling to leave the house. He sits by the chessboard for hours, enveloped in his studies until stirred.

Susan turns silent, her mind somewhere far as she holds her book. Her hands twitch too, a wince when the door slams, her hand flying to her back where her quiver isn't. She hums a sad melody that no one can place, mourning something no one can find. She takes up archery again when she can bear a bow in her hands without crying, her callous-less palms unfamiliar to her, her mind trapped behind the wall of adolescence. She loses her friends to girlishness and youth, unable to go back to what she was. Eventually, she loses Narnia too. It's easier, she tells herself, to grow up and move on and return to what is. But her mourning doesn't leave her; she just forgets.

Lucy remains bright, carrying a happier song than her sister. She dances endlessly, her bare feet in the grass, and sings the most beautiful songs that make the flowers grow and the sun glisten. Though she has grown too, shed her childhood with the end of the war. She stands around the table with her sister, watching, brow furrowed as her brothers play chess. She comments and predicts, and makes suggestions that they take. She reads, curled into Edmund's side as his high voice lulls her to sleep with tales of Arthurian legends. She swims, her form wild and graceful as she vanishes into the water. They can't figure out how she does it - a girl so small holding her breath for so long. She cries into her sister, weeping at the loss of her friends, her too-small hands too clumsy for her will.

"I don't know our children anymore," Helen writes to her husband, overcome by grief as she realizes her children haven't grown up but away into a place she cannot follow.

Mourning Bucky After His Death In 1945

Mourning Bucky After His Death in 1945

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